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A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



A 



CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



BY 






THE RIGHT HON. W;"E* GLADSTONE, M.P 



" Blame not, before thou hast examined the truth : understand 
first, and then rebuke." — Ecclesiasticus, ch. ii. 




LONDON: 
JOHN MUKKAY, ALBEMAKLE STEEET. 

1868. 

The. right of n-anslatinn is ressrved. 



<^ 



K>N1X>N : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, DUKE STREET, STAMFORD STREET, 
AND CHARING CROSS. 



INTRODUCTION. 



At a time when the Established Church of Ireland 
is on her trial, it is not unfair that her assailants 
should be placed upon their trial too : most of all, if 
they have at one time been her sanguine defenders. 

But if not the matter of the indictment against 
them, at any rate that of their defence, should be 
kept apart, as far as they are concerned, from the 
public controversy, that it may not darken or perplex 
the greater issue. 

It is in the character of the author of a book 
called ' The State in its Relations with the Church,' 
that I offer these pages to those who may feel a dis- 
position to examine them. They were written at the 
date attached to them ; but their publication has 
been delayed until after the stress of the General 
Election. 



CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 



AuTOBiOGKAPHY is commonly interesting ; but there 
can, I suppose, be little doubt that, as a general rule, 
it should be posthumous. The close of an active 
career supplies an obvious exception : for this re- 
sembles the gentle death which, according to ancient 
fable, was rather imparted than inflicted by the 
tender arrows of Apollo and of Artemis. I have 
asked myself many times, during the present year, 
whether peculiar combinations of circumstance might 
not also afford a warrant at times for departure from 
the general rule, so far as some special passage of 
life is concerned ; and whether I was not myself now 
placed in one of those special combinations. 

The motives, which incline me to answer these 
questions in the affirmative, are mainly two. First, 
that the great and glaring change in my course of 
action with respect to the Established Church of Ireland 
is not the mere eccentricity, or even perversion, of 
an individual mind, but connects itself with silent 
changes, which are advancing in the very bed and 
basis of modern society. Secondly, that the progress 
of a great cause, signal as it has been and is, appears 
liable nevertheless to suffer in point of credit, if not 
of energy and rapidity, from the real or supposed 



8 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

delinquencies of a person, with whose name for the 
moment it happens to he specially associated. 

One thing is clear : that if I am warranted in 
treating my own case as an excepted case, I am 
bound so to treat it. It is only with a view to the 
promotion of some general interest, that the public 
can becomingly be invited to hear more, especially in 
personal history, about an individual, of whom they 
already hear too much. But if it be for the gene- 
ral interest to relieve ^an enterprise of pith and 
moment ' from the odium of baseness, and from the 
lighter reproach of precipitancy, I must make the 
attempt ; though the obtrusion of the first person, 
and of all that it carries in its train, must be irksome 
alike to the reader and the writer. 

So far, indeed, as my observation has gone, the 
Liberal party of this country have stood fire un- 
flinchingly under the heavy vollies which have been 
fired into its camp with ammunition that had been 
drawn from depositories full only with matter per- 
sonal to myself. And, with the confidence they 
entertain in the justice and wisdom of the policy they 
recommend, it would have been weak and childish to 
act otherwise. Still, I should be glad to give them 
the means of knowing that the case may not after all 
be so scandalous as they are told. In the year 1827, 
if I remember right, when Mr. Canning had just 
become Prime Minister, an effort was made to support 
him in the town of Liverpool, where the light and 
music of his eloquence had not yet died away, by an 
Address to the Crown. The proposal was supported 
by an able and cultivated Unitarian Minister, Mr. 
Shepherd, who had been one of Mr. Canning's oppo- 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 9 

nents at former periods in the Liverpool elections. 
Vindicating the consistency of his course, he said he 
was ready to support the devil himself, if it had been 
necessary, in doing good. This was a succinct and 
rough manner of disposing of the question in the last 
resort. I hope, however, that those who sustain the 
Liberal policy respecting the Established Church of 
Ireland, will not be driven to so dire an extremity. 
It can hardly be deemed on my part an unnatural 
desire, that political friends, and candid observers, 
should on grounds of reason and knowledge, and not 
merely from friendly prepossession, feel themselves 
warranted not to believe in the justice of language 
such as by way of example I subjoin. I must, 
however, suppose that the author of it is persuaded 
of its fairness and justice, since he bears Her Majesty's 
Commission ; and his statement is adopted and pub- 
lished by a brother-officer, who is himself a candidate 
for Berwick in the ministerial interest, and therefore 
(I presume) not particularly squeamish on the sub- 
ject of political consistency, although I entertain no 
doubt that both are gallant, upright, and estimable 
gentlemen. 

" There is obviously no need, on the present occasion at 
least, to extend this catalogue of the political delinquencies 
of this would-be demagogue, whom we may accordingly leave 
gibbeted and swinging in the winds of the fools' paradise ! 
an object of derision and contempt to those at least who 
maintain that integrity of purpose and consistency ought not 
altogether to be discarded from public life." * 

It freezes the blood, in moments of retirement and 
reflexion, for a man to think that he can have pre- 

* From a placard just published at Berwiclv. 



10 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

sented a picture so hideous to the view of a fellow- 
creature ! 

One thing I have not done, and shall not do. I 
shall not attempt to laugh off the question, or to 
attenuate its importance. In theory at least, and for 
others, I am myself a purist with respect to what 
touches the consistency of statesmen. Change of 
opinion, in those to whose judgment the public looks 
more or less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, 
although a much smaller evil than their persistence 
in a course which they know to be wrong. It is not 
always to be blamed. But it is always to be watched 
with vigilance ; always to be challenged, and put 
upon its trial. The question is one of so much in- 
terest, that it may justify a few remarks. 

It can hardly escape even cursory observation, that 
the present century has seen a great increase in the 
instances of what is called political inconsistency. It 
is needless, and it would be invidious, to refer to 
names. Among the living, however, who have occu- 
pied leading positions, and among the dead of the 
last twenty years, numerous instances will at once 
occur to the mind, of men who have been constrained 
to abandon in middle and mature, or even in advanced 
life, convictions which they had cherished through 
long years of conflict and vicissitude : and of men, 
too, who have not been so fortunate as to close or 
continue their career in the same political connexion 
as that in which they commenced it. If we go a 
little farther back, to the day of Mr. Pitt and Mr. 
Fox, or even to the day of Mr. Canning, Lord Lon- 
donderry, or Lord Liverpool, we must be struck with 
the difference. A great political and social convul- 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOaRAPHY. 11 

sion, like the French Revolution, of necessity deranged 
the ranks of party ; yet not even then did any man of 
great name, or of a high order of mind, permanently 
change his side. 

If we have witnessed in the last forty years, 
beginning with the epoch of Eoman Catholic Eman- 
cipation, a great increase in the changes of party, or 
of opinion, among prominent men, we are not at once 
to leap to the conclusion that public character, as a 
rule, has been either less upright, or even less vigor- 
ous. The explanation is rather to be found in this, 
that the movement of the public mind has been of a 
nature entirely transcending former experience ; and 
that it has likewise been more promptly and more 
effectively represented, than at any earlier period, in 
the action of the Grovernment and the Legislature. 

If it is the ofSce of law and of institutions to reflect the 
wants and wishes of the country, (and its wishes must 
ever be a considerable element in its wants), then, as 
the nation passes from a stationary into a progressive 
period, it will justly require that the changes in its 
own condition and views should be represented in the 
professions and actions of its leading men. For they 
exist for its sake, not it for theirs. It remains indeed 
their business, now and ever, to take honour and 
duty for their guides, and not the mere demand or 
purpose of the passing hour ; but honour and duty 
themselves require their loyal servant to take account 
of the state of facts in which he is to work, and, while 
ever labouring to elevate the standard of opinion and 
action around him, to remember that his business is 
not to construct, with self-chosen materials, an Utopia 
or a Republic of Plato, but to conduct the affairs of 



12 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

a living and working community of men, who have 
self-government recognised as in the last resort the 
moving spring of their political life, and of the insti- 
tutions which are its outward vesture. 

The gradual transfer of political power from groups 
and limited classes to the community, and the con- 
stant seething of the public mind, in fermentation 
upon a vast mass of moral and social, as well as 
merely political, interests, offer conditions of action, 
in which it is evident that the statesman, in order to 
preserve the same amount of consistency as his ante- 
cessors in other times, must be gifted with a far 
larger range of foresight. But Nature has endowed 
him with no such superiority. It may be true that 
Sir Robert Peel shewed this relative deficiency in 
foresight, with reference to Eoman Catholic Emanci- 
pation, to Reform, and to the Corn Law. It does not 
follow that many, who have escaped the reproach, 
could have stood the trial. For them the barometer 
was less unsteady ; the future less exacting in its 
demands. But let us suppose that we could secure 
this enlargement of onward view, this faculty of 
measuring and ascertaining to-day the wants of a 
remote hereafter, in our statesmen ; we should not 
even then be at the end of our difficulties. For the 
public mind is to a great degree unconscious of its 
own progression ; and it would resent and repudiate, 
if offered to its immature judgment, the very policy, 
which after a while it will gravely consider, and after 
another while enthusiastically embrace. 

Yet, as it still remains true that the actual opinions 
and professions of men in office_, and men in autho- 
rity without office, are among the main landmarks 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 13 

on whicli the public has to rely, it may seem that, in 
vindicating an apparent liberty of change, we destroy 
the principal guarantees of integrity which are 
available for the nation at large, and with these all 
its confidence in the persons who are to manage its 
affairs. This would be a consequence so fatal^ that it 
might even drive us back upon the hopeless attempt 
to stereotype the minds of men, and fasten on their 
manhood the swaddling clothes of their infancy. But 
such is not the alternative. We may regulate the 
changes which we cannot forbid, by subjecting them 
to the test of public scrutiny, and by directing that . 
scrutiny to the enforcement of the laws of moral 
obligation. There are abundant signs, by which to 
distinguish between those changes, which prove 
nothing worse than the fallibility of the individual 
mind, and manoeuvres which destroy confidence, and 
entail merited dishonour. Changes which are sudden 
and precipitate — changes accompanied with a light 
and contemptuous repudiation of the former self — 
changes which are systematically timed and tuned 
to the interest of personal advancement — changes 
which are hooded, slurred over, or denied — for these 
changes, and such as these, I have not one word to 
say ; and if they can be justly charged upon me, I 
can no longer desire that any portion, however small, 
of the concerns or interests of my country men. should 
be lodged in my hands. 

Let me now endeavour to state the offence of 
which I am held guilty. J lie ego qui quondam : I, the 
person who have now accepted a foremost share of 
the responsibility of endeavouring to put an end 
to the existence of the Irish Church as an Establish- 



14 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

ment, am also the person who, of all men in official, 
perhaps in public life, did, until the year 1841, 
recommend, upon the highest and most imperious 
grounds, its resolute maintenance. 

The book entitled ' The State in its Relations with 
the Church' was printed during the autumn of 1838, 
while I was making a tour in the South of Europe, 
which the state of my eyesight had rendered it 
prudent to undertake. Three editions of it were 
published without textual change ; and in the year 
1841 a fourth, greatly enlarged, though in other 
respects little altered, issued from the press. All 
interest in it had, however, even at that time, long 
gone by, and it lived for nearly thirty years only in 
the vigorous and brilliant, though not (in my opinion) 
entirely faithful picture, drawn by the accomplished 
hand of Lord Macaulay. During the present year, 
as I understand from good authority, it has again 
been in demand, and in my hearing it has received 
the emphatic suffrages of many, of whose approval I 
was never made aware during the earlier and less 
noisy stages of its existence. 

The distinctive principle of the book was supposed 
to be, that the State had a conscience. But the con- 
troversy really lies not in the existence of a conscience 
in the State, so much as in the extent of its range. 
Few would deny the obligation of a State to follow 
the moral law. Every Treaty, for example, proceeds 
upon it. The true issue was this : whether the State, 
in its best condition, has such a conscience as can 
take cognizance of religious truth and error, and in 
particular whether the State of the United Kingdom, 
at a period somewhat exceeding thirty years ago, was 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 15 

or was not so far in that condition as to be under an 
obligation to give an active and an exclusive support 
to the established religion of the country. 

The work attempted to survey the actual state of the 
relations between the State and the Church ; to show 
from History the ground which had been defined 
for the National Church at the Eeformation ; and to 
inquire and determine whether the existing state of 
things was worth preserving, and defending against 
encroachment from whatever quarter. This question 
it decided emphatically in the affirmative. 

An early copy of the Eeview containing the 
powerful essay of Lord Macaulay was sent to me ; 
and I found that to the main proposition, sufficiently 
startling, of the work itself, the reviewer had added 
this assumption, that it contemplated not indeed per- 
secution, but yet the retrogressive process of disabling 
and disqualifying from civil office all those who did 
not adhere to the religion of the State. Before (I 
think) the number of the ' Edinburgh Review ' for 
April, 1839, could have been in the hands of the 
public, I had addressed to Lord (then Mr.) Macaulay 
the following letter, which I shall make no apology for 
inserting, inasmuch as it will introduce one more 
morsel of his writing, for which the public justly 
shows a keen and insatiable appetite. 

DeAK SiE, 6, Carlton Gardens, April 10th, 1839, 

I have been favoured with a copy of the forthcoming 
number of the * Edinburgh Keview,' and I perhaps too 
much presume upon the bare acquaintance with you of 
which alone I can boast, in thus unceremoniously assuming 
you to be the author of the article entitled * Church and 
State,' and in offering you my very warm and cordial thanks 



16 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOaRAPHY. 

for the manner in which you have treated both the work, and 
the author, on whom you deigned to bestow your attention. 
In whatever you write, you can hardly hope for the privilege 
of most anonymous productions, a real concealment ; but if 
it had been possible not to recognize you, I should have 
questioned your authorship in this particular case, because 
the candour and single-mindedness which it exhibits are, in 
one who has long been connected in the most distinguished 
manner with political party, so rare as to be almost 
incredible. 

I hope to derive material benefit, at some more tranquil 
season, from a consideration of your argument throughout. 
I am painfully sensible, whenever I have occasion to re-open 
the book, of its shortcomings, not only of the subject but 
even of my own conceptions : and I am led to suspect that, 
under the influence of most kindly feelings, you have 
omitted to criticize many things besides the argument, which 
might fairly have come within your animadversion. 

In the mean time I hope you will allow me to apprise you 
that on one material point especially I am not so far 
removed from you as you suppose. I am not conscious that 
I have said either that the Test Act should be repealed, or 
that it should not have been passed : and though on such 
subjects language has many bearings which escape the view 
of the writer at the moment when the pen is in his hand, 
yet I think that I can hardly have put forth either of these 
propositions, because I have never entertained the corre- 
sponding sentiments. Undoubtedly I should speak of the 
pure abstract idea of Church and State as implying that 
they are co-extensive : and I should regard the present 
composition of the State of the United Kingdom as a devia- 
tion from that pure idea, but only in the same sense as all 
differences of religious opinion in the Church are a deviation 
from its pure idea, while I not only allow that they are 
permitted, but believe that (within limits) they were in- 
tended to be permitted. There are some of these deflections 
from abstract theory which appear to me allow^able ; and that 
of the admission of persons not holding the national creed 
into civil office is one which, in my view, must be determined 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 17 

by times and circumstances. At the same time I do not 
recede from any protest which I have made against the 
principle, that religious differences are irrelevant to the 
question of competency for civil office : but I would take my 
stand between the opposite extremes, the one that no such 
differences are to be taken into view, the other that all 
such differences are to constitute disqualifications. 

I need hardly say the question I raise is not whether you 
have misrepresented me, for, were I disposed to anything so 
weak, the whole internal evidence and clear intention of your 
article would confute me : indeed I feel I ought to apologize 
for even supposing that you may have been mistaken in the 
apprehension of my meaning, and I freely admit on the other 
hand the possibility that, totally without my own knowledge, 
my language may have led to such an interpretation. 

In these lacerating times one clings to everything of 
personal kindness in the past, to husband it for the future, 
and if you will allow me I shall earnestly desire to carry 
with me such a recollection of your mode of dealing with the 
subject ; upon which, the attainment of truth, we shall agree, 
so materially depends upon the temper in which the search 
for it is instituted and conducted. 

I did not mean to have troubled you at so much length, 
and I have only to add that I am, with much respect, 

Dear Sir, 

Very truly yours, 

W. E. Gladstone. 

T. B, Macaulay, Esq. 



My DEAK Sir, 3, Clarges street, April 11th, 1839. 

I have very seldom been more gratified than by the very 
kind note which I have just received from you. Your book 
itself, and everything that I heard about you, though almost 
all my information came — to the honour, I must say, of our 
troubled times — from people very strongly opposed to you 
in politics, led me to regard you with respect and good will, 

C 



18 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

and I am truly glad that I have succeeded in marking those 
feelings. I was half afraid when I read myself oyer again 
in print, that the button, as is too common in controversial 
fencing even between friends, had once or twice come off 
the foil. 

I am very glad to find that we do not differ so widely as I 
had apprehended about the Test Act. I can easily explain 
the way in which I was misled. Your general principle is 
that religious non-conformity ought to be a disqualification 
for civil office. In page 238 you say that the true and 
authentic mode of ascertaining conformity is the Act of 
Communion. I thought, therefore, that your theory pointed 
directly to a renewal of the Test Act. And I do not re- 
collect that you have ever used any expression importing 
that your theory ought in practice to be modified by any 
considerations of civil prudence. All the exceptions that you 
mention are, as far as I remember, founded on positive 
contract — not one on expediency, even in cases where the 
expediency is so strong and so obvious that most statesmen 
would call it necessity. If I had understood that you meant 
your rules to be followed out in practice only so far as might 
be consistent with the peace and good government of society, 
I should certainly have expressed myself very differently in 
several parts of my article. 

Accept my warm thanks for your kindness, and believe me, 
with every good wish, 

My dear Sir, 

Very truly yours, 

T. B. ]\rACAULAY. 
W. E. Gladstone, Esq., M.P. 

Faithful to logic, and to its theory, my work did not 
shrink from applying them to the crucial case of the 
Irish Church. It did not disguise the difficulties of 
the case, for I was alive to the paradox it involved. 
But the one master idea of the system, that the State 
as it then stood was capable in this age, as it had 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 19 

been in ages long gone by, of assuming beneficially 
a responsibility for the inculcation of a particular 
religion, carried me througb. all. My doctrine was, 
that the Church, as established by law, was to be 
maintained for its truth ; that this was the only prin- 
ciple on which it could be properly and permanently 
upheld ; that this principle, if good in England, was 
good also for Ireland ; that truth is of all possessions 
the most precious to the soul of man ; and that to 
remove, as I then erroneously thought we should 
remove, this priceless treasure from the view and the 
reach of the Irish people, would be meanly to pur- 
chase their momentary favour at the expense of their 
permanent interests, and would be a high offence 
against our own sacred obligations. 

These, I think, were the leading propositions of 
the work. In one important point, however, it was 
inconsistent with itself; it contained a full admission 
that a State might, by its nature and circumstances, 
be incapacitated from upholding and propagating a 
definite form of religion.* 

"There may be a state of things in the United States 
of America, perhaps in some British colonies, there does 
actually exist a state of things, in which religious communions 
are so equally divided, or so variously subdivided, that the 
Government is itself similarly chequered in its religious com- 
plexion, and thus internally incapacitated by disunion from 
acting in matters of religion ; or, again, there may be a State 
in which the members of Government may be of one faith or 
persuasion, the mass of the subjects of another, and hence 
there may be an external incapacity to act in matters of 
religion." 

* 'The State in its Relations with the Church,' ch. ii., sect. 71, p. 73. 
Editions 1-3. 

C 2 



20 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

The book goes on to describe that incapacity, how- 
ever produced, as a social defect and calamity. But 
the latter part of the work, instead of acknowledging 
such incapacity as a sufficient and indeed commanding 
plea for abstention, went beyond the bounds of mode- 
ration, and treated it as if it must in all cases be a 
sin ; as though any association of men, in civil 
government or otherwise, could be responsible for 
acting beyond the line of the capabilities determined 
for it by its constitution and composition. My 
meaning I believe was, to describe only cases in 
which there might be a deliberate renunciation of 
such duties as there was the power to fulfil. But the 
line is left too obscurely dniwn between this wilful 
and wanton rejection of opportunities for good, and 
the cases in which the state of religious convictions, 
together with the recognised principles of govern- 
ment, disable the civil power from including within 
its work the business of either directly or indirectly 
inculcating religion, and mark out for it a different 
line of action. 

I believe that the foregoing passages describe fairly, 
if succinctly, the main propositions of ^ The State in its 
Eelations with the Church ; ' so far as the book bears 
upon the present controversy. They bound me hand 
and foot : they hemmed me in on every side. Further 
on I shall endeavour to indicate more clearly in what 
I think the book was right, and in what it was 
wrong. What I have now to show is the manner 
in which I retreated from an untenable position. To 
this retreat, and the time and mode of it, I now draw 
attention, and I will endeavour to apply to them the 
tests I have already laid down : — Was it sudden ? 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 21 

Was it performed with an indecent levity ? Was it 
made to minister to the interests of political ambi- 
tion ? Was the gravity of the case denied or under- 
stated ? Was it daringly pretended that there had 
been no real change of front ; and that, if the world 
had understood me otherwise, it had misunderstood 
me ? My opinion of the Established Church of Ire- 
land now is the direct opposite of what it was then. 
I then thought it reconcilable with civil and national 
justice ; I now think the maintenance of it grossly 
unjust. I then thought its action was favourable to 
the interests of the religion which it teaches ; I now 
believe it to be opposed to them. 

But I must venture to point out that, whatever be 
the sharpness of this contradiction, it is one from 
which I could not possibly escape by endeavouring 
to maintain the Established Church of Ireland on the 
principles on which it is now maintained. I challenge 
all my censors to impugn me when I affirm that, if 
the propositions of my work are in conflict (as they 
are) with an assault upon the existence of the Irish 
Establishment, they are at least as much, or even 
more, hostile to the grounds on which it is now 
attempted to maintain it. At no time of my life did 
I propound the maxim simpliciter that we were to 
maintain the Establishment. I appeal to the few who 
may have examined my work otherwise than for the 
purpose of culling from it passages which would tell 
in a quotation. I appeal to the famous article of 
Lord Macaulay,* who says with truth — 

*' Mr. Gladstone's whole theory rests on this great 
fundamental proposition, that the propagation of re- 

* ' Edinburgh Review,' April, 1839, p. 235. 



22 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 

ligious truth is one of the principal ends of govern- 
ment, as government. If Mr. Gladstone has not 
proved this proposition^ his system vanishes at once!' 

This was entirely just. In the protest I addressed 
to the distinguished Reviewer on a particular point, I 
took no exception to it whatever. My work had 
used (as far as I believe and remember) none of 
the stock arguments for maintaining the Church of 
Ireland. I did not say " maintain it, lest you should 
disturb the settlement of property." I did not say 
" maintain it, lest you should be driven to repeal the 
Union." I did not say " maintain it, lest you should 
offend and exasperate the Protestants." I did not 
say " maintain it, because the body known as the 
Irish Church has an indefeasible title to its property.'* 
I did not say " maintain it for the spiritual benefit of 
a small minority." Least of all did I say " maintain 
it, but establish religious equality, setting uj) at the 
public charge other establishments along with it, or 
by distributing a sop here and a sop there, to coax 
Roman Catholics and Presbyterians into a sort of 
acquiescence in its beiug maintained." These topics 
I never had made my own. Scarcely ever, in the 
first efforts of debate, had I referred to one of them. 
My trumpet, however shrill and feeble, had at least 
rung out its note clearly. And my ground, right or 
wrong it matters not for the present purpose, was 
this : the Church of Ireland must be maintained for 
the benefit of the whole people of Ireland, and must 
be maintained as the truth, or it cannot be main- 
tained at all. 

Accordingly my book contended that the principle 
of the Grant to Maynooth. unless as a simply cove- 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 23 

nanted obligation,* and that of the Established 
Church of Ireland, could not stand together. In the 
House of Commons, on the question relating to the 
Grant, I am reported as having said in the year 
1838, f that I objected to the Grant because it was 
fatal to the main principle on which the Established 
Church was founded. 

And further. The Liberal Government and party 
of that day proposed, in 1835 and the following 
years, the famous "Appropriation Clause." The* 
principle of their measure was, that the surplus funds 
only of the Irish Church were to be applied to 
popular education, after adequate provision had been 
made for the spiritual wants of the Protestants. This 
principle, that adequate provision is to be made for 
the spiritual wants of the Protestants, before any 
other claim on the property of the Irish Church can 
be admitted, was the basis of the Appropriation 
Clause ; and is, as I understand the matter, the very 
principle which is now maintained against the Liberal 
party of 1868, by the (so-called) defenders of the 
Irish Established Church. But this principle I de- 
nounced in 1836 as strongly as I could now do. I 
extract the following passage from a report in 
' Hansard,' which, as I remember, I had myself cor- 
rected, of a speech on the Irish Tithe Bill with the 
Appropriation Clause : — J 

"A Church Establishment is maintained either for the 
sake of its members or its doctrines ; for those whom it 

* p. 252. 

t ' Mirror of Parliament,' Monday, July 30, 1838. The passage, which 
is full and clear, is more briefly given, but to the same effect, in ' Hansard ,' 
vol. xliv. p. 817. 

t June 1, 1836. ' Hansard,' vol. xxxiii. p. 1317. 



21 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

teaches, or for that which it teaches. On the former ground 
it is not in equity tenable for a moment. 

" Why should any preference be given to me over another 
fellow-subject, or what claim have I personally to have my 
religion supported, whilst another is disavowed by the State ? 
No claim whatever in respect to myself. I concur entirely 
with gentlemen opposite, hostile to an Establishment, that 
no personal privilege ought in such a matter to be allowed. 

" But if, on the contrary, I believe, as the great bulk of the 
British Legislature does believe, that the doctrine and system 
of the Establishment contain and exhibit truth in its pm-est 
and most effective form, and if we also believe truth to be 
good for the people universally, then we have a distinct and 
immovable ground for the maintenance of an Establish- 
ment ; but it follows as a matter of course from the principle, 
that it must be maintained, not on a scale exactly and strictly 
adjusted to the present number of its own members, but on 
such a scale that it may also have the means of offering to 
others the benefits which it habitually administers to them. 

" Therefore we wish to see the Estabhshment in Ireland 
upheld ; not for the sake of the Protestants, but of the people 
at large, that the ministers may be enabled to use the influ- 
ences of their station, of kindly offices and neighbourhood, of 
the various occasions which the daily intercourse and habits 
of social life present ; aye, and I do not hesitate to add of 
persuasion itself, applied with a zeal tempered by knowledge 
and discretion, in the propagation of that which is true, and 
which, being true, is good as well for those who as yet have 
it not, as well for those who have it. It is the proposition of 
the noble Lord which is really open to the charge of bigotry, 
intolerance, and arbitrary selection ; because, disavowing the 
maintenance and extension of truth, he continues by way of 
personal privilege to the Protestants the legal recognition of 
their Church, which he refuses to the Church of the Eoman 
Catholic." 

The negative part of this passage I adojDt, except the 
censure it implies upon Earl Eussell and his friends ; 
who, whether their actual propositions were defensible 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 25 

or not^ had the " root of the matter " in their hearts, 
and were far ahead of me in their political forethought, 
and in their desire to hold up at least the banner of 
a generous and a hopeful policy towards Ireland. 

In this manner I prove that, while I was bound 
by the propositions of my work, I was not singly but 
doubly bound. I was bound to defend the Irish 
Church, as long as it could be defended on the 
ground of its truth. But when the day arrived on 
which that ground was definitively abandoned, on 
which a policy v^as to be adopted by the Imperial 
Parliament such as to destroy this plea for the Irish 
Establishment, I was equally bound in such case to 
adopt no other : I had shown that justice would fail 
to warrant the mere support of the Church- of the 
minority ; I was held, therefore, not to construct out 
of rags and tatters, shreds and patches, a new and 
different case for maintaining it on the ground of 
favour, or, as it is termed, justice, to Protestants ; 
and, if I had done anything of this kind, I should 
not have escaped the responsibility of inconsistency, 
but should simply have added a second and (as I 
think) a less excusable inconsistency to the first. 

The day for the ado23tion of such a policy as I have 
described was not far distant. 

Scarcely had my work issued from the press when 
I became aware that there was no party, no section 
of a party, no individual person probably in the House 
of Commons, who was prepared to act upon it. I 
found myself the last man on the sinking ship. Ex- 
clusive support to the established religion of the 
country, with a limited and local exception for Scot- 
land under the Treaty of Union with that country, 



26 A chaptp:r of autobiography. 

had been up to that time the actual rule of our policy ; 
the instances to the contrary being of equivocal con- 
struction, and of infinitesimal amount. But the attempt 
to give this rule a vitality other than that of sufferance 
was an anachronism in time and in place. When I bid 
it live, it was just about to die. It was really a quick- 
ened and not a deadened conscience in the country, 
which insisted on enlarging the circle of State support, 
even while it tended to restrain the range of political 
interference in religion. The condition of our poor, 
of our criminals, of our military and naval services, 
and the backward state of popular education, forced 
on us a group of questions, before the moral pressure 
of which the old rules properly gave way. At and 
about the same peiiod, new attempts to obtain grants 
of public money for the building of churches in 
England and Scotland, I am thankful to say, failed. 
The powerful Grovernment of 1843 also failed to carry 
a measure of Factory Education, because of the pre- 
ference it was thought to give to the Established 
Church. I believe the very first opinion I ever was 
called upon to give in Cabinet was an opinion in 
favour of the withdrawal of that measure. 

In this state of facts and feelings, notwithstanding 
the strength of anti-Eoman opinion, it was impossible 
that Ireland should not assert her share, and that a 
large one_, to consideration in these critical matters. 
The forces, which were now at work, brought speedily 
to the front and to the top that question of Maynootb 
College, which I had always (rightly or wrongly) 
treated as a testing question for the foundations of the 
Irish Established Church ; as, in point of principle, 
the Artkulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesiw. 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 27 

In the course of the year 1844, when I was a 
member of the Cabinet of Sir Robert Peel, he made 
known to me his opinion that it was desirable to re- 
model and to increase the Grant to Maynooth. I was 
the youngest member of that Government, entirely 
bound up with it in policy, and warmly attached, by 
respect and even affection, to its head and to some of 
its leading members. Of association with what was 
termed ultra-Toryism in general politics I had never 
dreamed. I well knew that the words of Sir R. Peel 
were not merely tentative, but that, as it was right 
they should, they indicated a fixed intention. The 
choice before me, therefore, was, to support his mea- 
sure, or to retire from his Government into a position 
of complete isolation, and what was more than this, 
subject to a grave and general imputation of political 
eccentricity. My retirement, I knew^ could have no 
other warrant than this : that it would be a tribute 
to those laws which, as I have urged, must be upheld 
for the restraint of changes of opinion and conduct in 
public men. For I never entertained the idea of 
opposing the measure of Sir Robert Peel. I can 
scarcely be guilty of a breach of confidence when I 
mention that Lord Derby, to whom I had already 
been indebted for much personal kindness, was one of 
those colleagues who sought to dissuade me from re- 
signing my office. He urged upon me that such an 
act must be followed by resistance to the measure of 
the Government, and that I should run the risk of 
being mixed with a fierce religious agitation. I 
replied that I must adhere to my purpose of retire- 
ment, but that I did not perceive the necessity of its 
being followed by resistance to the proposal. Over- 



28 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 

tures were, not unnaturally, made to me by some of 
those who resisted it ; but they were at once declined. 
My whole purpose was to place myself in a position 
in which I should be free to consider my course 
without being liable to any just suspicion on the 
ground of personal interest. It is not profane if I 
say " with a great price obtained I this freedom." 
The political association in which I stood was to me 
at the time the alpha and omega of public life. The 
Government of Sir Eobert Peel was believed to be of 
immovable strength. My place, as President of the 
Board of Trade, was at the very kernel of its most 
interesting operations; for it was in progress from 
year to year, with continually waxing courage, 
towards the emancipation of industry, and therein 
towards the accomplishment of another great and 
blessed work of public justice. Griving up what I 
highly prized, aware that 

" male sarta 
Gratia nequicquam coit, et rescinditur," * 

I felt myself open to the charge of being opinionated, 
and wanting in deference to really great authorities ; 
and I could not but know I should be regarded as 
fastidious and fanciful, fitter for a dreamer, or possibly 
a schoolman, than for the active purposes of public 
life in a busy and moving age. In effect so it was. 
In the month of January, 1845, if not sooner, the 
resolution of the Cabinet was taken ; and I resigned. 
The public judgment, as might have been expected, 
did not favour the act. I remember that the ' Daily 
News,' then as now a journal greatly distinguished for 
an almost uniform impartiality, as well as for breadth 

* Hor. Ep. ii. 3. 31. 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 29 

of view and high discernment, remarked at the time 
or afterwards upon the case, as a rare one, in which a 
puhKc man had injured himself with the pubhc by an 
act which must in fairness be taken to be an act of 
self- denial. I hope that reference to this criticism will 
not be considered boastful . It can hardly be so ; for an 
infirm judgment, exhibited in a practical indiscretion, 
is after all the theme of these pages. I do not claim 
acquittal upon any one of the counts of indictment 
which I have admitted may be brought against the 
conduct I pursued. One point only I plead, and plead 
with confidence. It proved that I was sensible of the 
gravity of any great change in political conduct or 
opinion, and desirous beyond all things of giving to 
the country such guarantees as I could give of my 
integrity^ even at the expense of my judgment and 
fitness for affairs. If any man doubts this, I ask him 
to ask himself, what demand political honour could 
have made with which I failed to comply ? 

In the ensuing debate on the Address (February 4, 
1845), Lord John Russell, in terms of courtesy and 
kindness which I had little deserved from him, called 
for an explanation of the cause of my retirement. In 
a statement which I corrected for ' Hansard's Debates,' 
I replied that it had reference to the intentions of the 
Grovernment with respect to Maynooth ; that those 
intentions pointed to a measure " at variance with the 
system which I had maintained," ^' in a form the most 
detailed and deliberate," " in a published treatise:" 
that although I had never set forth any theory of 
political affairs as " under all circumstances inflexible 
and immutable," yet I thought those who had borne 
such solemn testimony to a particular view of a great 



30 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 

constitutional question, ^' ought not to be parties 
responsible for proposals which involved a material 
departure from it." And the purpose of my retire- 
ment was to " place myself, so far as in me lay, in a 
position to form not only an honest, but likewise an 
independent and an unsuspected judgment," on the 
plan likely to be submitted by the Grovernment. I 
also spoke as follows, in more forms than one : 

" I wish again and most distinctly to state, that I am not 
prepared to take part in any religious warfare against that 
measure, such as I believe it may be ; or to draw a dis- 
tinction between the Koman Catholics and other deno- 
minations of Christians, with reference to the religious 
opinions \Ahich each of them respectively may hold." 

Now I respectfully submit that by this act my 
freedom was established ; and that it has never since, 
during a period of nearly five-and-twenty years, been 
compromised. 

Some may say that it is perfectly consistent to 
have endowed Maynooth anew, and yet to uphold on 
principle, as a part of the Constitution, the Established 
Church of Ireland. It may be consistent, for them ; 
it was not consistent, as I have distinctly shown, for 
me. The moment that I admitted the validity of a 
claim by the Church of Rome for the gift, by the free 
act of the Imperial Parliament, of new funds for the 
education of its clergy, the true basis of the Esta- 
blished Church of Ireland for me was cut away. The 
one had always been treated by me as exclusive of the 
other. It is not now the question whether this way 
of looking at the question was a correct one. There 
are great authorities against it ; while it seems at the 
same time to have some considerable hold on what may 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 31 

be termed the moral sense of portions, perhaps large 
portions, of the people. The present question is one 
of fact. It is enough for the present purpose, that 
such was my view. From that day forward, I have 
never to my knowledge said one word, in public or 
in private, which could pledge me on principle to the 
maintenance of the Irish Church. Nay, in a speech, 
delivered on the second reading of the Maynooth 
College Bill, I took occasion distinctly to convey, that 
the application of religious considerations to eccle- 
siastical questions in Ireland would be entirely altered 
by the passing of the measure : — 

" The boon to which I for one have thus agreed, is a very 
great boon. I think it important, most of all important with 
regard to the principles it involves. I am very far, indeed, 
from saying that it virtuaHy decides upon the payment of 
the Koman Catholic priests of Ireland by the State : but I do 
not deny that it disposes of the religious objections to that 
measure. I mean that we, who assent to this Bill, shall in 
my judgment no longer be in a condition to plead religious 
objections to such a project." * 

True, I did not say that I was thenceforward pre- 
pared at any moment to vote for the removal of the 
Established Church in Ireland. And this for the best 
of all reasons : it would not have been true. It is 
one thing to lift the anchor ; it is another to spread 
the sails. It may be a duty to be in readiness for 
departure, when departure itself would be an offence 
against public prudence and public principle. But 
I do not go so far even as this. On the contrary, I 
was willing and desirous f that it should be permitted 
to continue. If its ground in logic was gone, yet it 
might have, in fact, like much besides, its day of 

* ' Speech on the Second Reading of the Maynooth College Bill,' 1845, 
p. 44. • t Ihicl, p. 33. 



32 A CHAP^T.R OF AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 

grace. I do not now say that I leapt at once to the 
conclusion that the Established Church of Ireland 
must at any definite period " cease to exist as an 
Establishment." She had my sincere good will ; I 
was not sorry, I was glad, that while Ireland seepaed 
content to have it so, a longer time should be granted 
her to unfold her religious energies through the 
medium of an active and pious clergy, which until 
this our day she had never possessed. My mind 
recoiled then, as it recoils . now, from the idea of 
worrying the Irish Church to death. I desired that 
it should remain even as it was, until the way should 
be opened, and the means at hand, for bringing about 
some better state of things. 

Moreover, it was a duty, from my point of view, 
completely to exhaust every chance on behalf of the 
Irish Church. I have not been disposed, at any 
time of life, gratuitously to undertake agitation of the 
most difficult, and at times apparently the most hope- 
less questions. At the period of the Appropriation 
Clause, I represented to myself, and I believe to 
others, that the true power of the Church as a religious 
engine had never up to that period been fairly tried. 
In name a religious institution, her influences, her 
benefices, her sees, were commonly employed for pur- 
poses, which we must condemn as secular, even if 
they had not been utterly anti-national. Only within 
a few, a very few years, had her clergy even 
begun to bestir themselves ; and they had forthwith 
found that, from the unsettled state of the law of 
tithe, they were in the midst of an agitation, both 
menacing to public order, and even perilous to 
life. I was desirous to see what, after person and 
property should have been rendered secure, and a 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 33 

peaceful atmosphere restored, a generation of pious 
and zealous men could accomplish in their actual 
position. I am still of the opinion that thirty -five 
years ago the religion of the Irish Church had not — 
to her and to our shame be it spoken— had fair play. 
From the days of Elizabeth downwards, with the 
rarest exceptions, the worldly element had entirely 
outweighed the religious one (whatever the intention 
may have been) in the actual working of the eccle- 
siastical institutions of Ireland. Mr. Burke has 
immortalised the burning shame and the hideous 
scandals of those penal laws which, perhaps for the 
first time in the history of Christendom if not of man, 
aimed at persecuting men out of one religion, but not 
at persecuting them into another. I will not be so 
rash as to enter on the field — 

"Per quern niagnus equos Auruncse flexit alumnus." 

But the time of awakening had come. The Irish 
Church had grown conscious that she had a Gospel 
to declare. Even with my present opinions I might 
feel a scruple as to the measures now proposed, but 
for the resistless and accumulated proof of impotence 
afforded by the experience of my life-time, and due, 
I believe, to a radically false position. For the Irish 
Church has, since the tithe war of 1830-2 came to an 
end, had not only fair play — that is such fair play as 
in Ireland the Establishment allows to the Church — 
but fair play and something more. She has enjoyed 
an opportunity, extending over a generation of men, 
with circumstances of favour such as can hardly be 
expected to recur. What has been her case? She 
has had ample endowments ; perfect security ; an 

D 



34 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

almost unbroken freedom from the internal contro- 
versies which have chastened (though, in chastening, 
I believe improved) the Church of England. The 
knowledge of the Irish language has been extensively 
attained by her clergy.* She has had all the moral 
support that could be given her by the people of this 
country ; for it was the people, and not a mere party, 
who, in 1835-8, repudiated and repelled the Appro- 
priation Clause. Her rival, the Church of Eome, 
has seen its people borne down to the ground by 
famine ; and then thinned from year to year, in hun- 
dreds of thousands, by the resistless force of emigra- 
tion. And, last and most of all, in the midst of that 
awful visitation of 1847-8, her Protestant Clergy 
came to the Roman Catholic people clad in the garb 
of angels of light ; for, besides their own bounty 
(most liberal, I believe, in proportion to their means), 
they became the grand almoners of the British nation. 
When, after all this, we arrive at a new census of 
religion in 1861, we find that only the faintest im- 
pression has been made upon the relative numbers 
of the two bodies ; an impression much slighter, I 
apprehend, than would have been due to the com- 
parative immunity of the Established Church from 
the drain of emigration ; and, if so, representing in 
reality, not a gain, but a virtual loss of some part 
of the narrow ground which before was occupied by 
the favoured religion of the State. 

Like others, I have watched with interest the 
results of those missionary operations in the West 
of Ireland which have, perhaps, been construed as of 
a greater ulterior significance than really belongs to 

* See ' Life of Archbishop Whately.' 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOaRAPHY. 35 

them. They were, I understand, due not so much to 
the EstabHshed Church, as to reHgious bodies in this 
country, which expend large funds in Ireland for the 
purpose of making converts : an operation in which 
the Presbyterians and Protestant Dissenters lend their 
aid. Let them not be undervalued. But I, for one, 
recollect that this is not the first time when local 
and occasional inroads have been successfully effected 
by Protestants upon the serried phalanx of the 
Roman Church in Ireland, and have been mistaken 
for signs of permanent or a general conquest. More 
than forty years ago. Bishop Blomfield — no mean 
authority — prophesied or announced, in the House of 
Lords, that a second Reformation had then begun. 
And there had indeed taken place in Ireland at that 
time one, if not more than one, instance of conver- 
sions on a large scale to the Established Church, 
such as was well calculated to excite sanguine antici- 
pations, though they were dispelled by subsequent 
experience. I think we ought now to perceive that 
the annexation of the warrant of civil authority to 
the religious embassy of the Irish Church, discredits 
in lieu of recommending it in the view of the Irish 
people. I do not mean that we are to put down the 
Establishment for the sake of a more effective propa- 
gandism. We must not for a moment forget that 
civil justice, an adaptation of tlie state of things in 
Ireland to the essential principles of political right, is 
that one broad and more than sufficient justification 
of the measure, in which all its advocates agree. But, 
over and above this, they may also agree in reflecting 
with satisfaction that the time is about to come when 
in Ireland, in lieu of a system which insults the re- 

D 2 



36 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOaRAPHY. 

ligion of the majority and makes that of tlie minority 
powerless, creeds will comjoete upon the level, and 
will thrive according to their merits. Nor will they 
be offended with one another when, in the anticipa- 
tion of such a state of things, each man who has faith 
in freedom, faith in justice, faith in truth, anticipates 
a harvest of benefit for his own. 

The emancipation thus effected from the net in 
which I had been bound was soon after tested. In 
1846, it was suggested to me that I should oppose a 
member of the newly-formed Grovernment of Lord 
John Russell. In my reply, declining the proposal, 
I wrote thus : " As to the Irish Church, I am not 
able to go to war with them on the ground that they 
will not pledge themselves to the maintenance of the 
existing appropriation of Church property in Ire- 
land." This, however, was a private proceeding. 
But, early in 1847, Mr. Estcourt announced his 
resignation of the seat he had held, amidst universal 
respect, for the University of Oxford. The partiality 
of friends j^i'oposed me as a candidate. The repre- 
sentation of that University was, I think, stated by 
Mr. Canning to be to him the most coveted prize of 
political life. I am not ashamed to own that I desired 
it with an almost passionate fondness. For besides all 
the associations it maintained and revived, it was in 
those days an honour not only given without solici- 
tation, but, when once given, not withdrawn.* The 
contest was conducted with much activity, and some 
heat. I was, naturally enough, challenged as to my 
opinions on the Established Church of Ii'eland. My 

* The case of Sir R. Peel, in 1829, I do not consider an exception to this 
remark, as lie gave back tlie charge into the hands of the electors. 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. [ 37 

friend Mr. Coleridge, then young, but already dis- 
tinguished, was one of my most active and able 
supporters. He has borne spontaneous testimony, 
within the last few weeks, to the manner in which 
the challenge was met : — 

*' Gentlemen, I must be permitted — because an attack has 
been made upon Mr. Gladstone, and it has been suggested 
that his conversion to his present principles is recent — to 
mention what is within my own knowledge and experience 
with regard to him. In 1847, when I was just leaving 
Oxford, I had the great honour of being secretary to his first 
election committee for that university, and I well recollect 
how, upon that occasion, some older and more moderate 
supporters were extremely anxious to draw from him some 
pledge that he should stand by the Irish Church. He dis- 
tinctly refused to pledge himself to anything of the kind."* 

The next Parliamentary occasion, after the May- 
nooth Grrant, which brought prominently into view 
the ecclesiastical arrangements of Ireland, was that 
of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill in 1851. I felt bound, 
as one of a very small minority, but in cordial agree- 
ment with the chief surviving associates of Sir Robert 
Peel, to offer all the opposition in my power, not 
only to the clauses by which the party then called 
Protectionist, and now Tory, Conservative, or Con- 
stitutionalist, endeavoured to sharpen the sting of the 
measure, but to the substance of the measure itself. I 
may be permitted to observe, that for the representa- 
tive of the University of Oxford thus to set himself 
against the great bulk of the Liberal as well as the 
Conservative party, whatever else it may have been, 
was not a servile or a self-seeking course. But this 

* Mr. Coleridge's speech at Exeter, Angnst, 1868. From the * Man- 

cliester Examiner ' of August 22. 



38 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

is irrelevant. It is more to the present purpose to 
observe that, in resisting this measure, I did not 
attempt to mitigate the offence by any profession of 
adhesion in principle to the maintenance of the Esta- 
blished Church of Ireland ; but I spoke as follows : — 

" We cannot change the profound and resistless tendencies 
of the age towards religious liberty. It is our business to 
guide and control their application. Do this you may. But 
to endeavour to turn them backwards is the sport of children, 
done by the hands of men ; and every effort you may make 
in that direction will recoil upon you in disaster and dis- 
grace." * 

The years flowed on. From 1846 forwards, the 
controversy of Free Trade was, as a rule, the com- 
manding and absorbing controversy, the pole of 
political affairs. But from time to time motions were 
made in relation to the Established Church of Ire- 
land. That question remained as one asleep, but 
whose sleej) is haunted with uneasy dreams. These 
motions were, as far as I remember them, uniformly 
of a narrow and partial character. They aimed at 
what is called getting in the thin end of the wedge. 
All honour, however, to each one of those who made 
them. The mover of any such proposal was vox 
clamantis in deserto. The people of England had, in 
1835-8, settled the matter for the time. The re- 
proaches now made against the older leaders and the 
body of the Liberal party for not having seriously 
entered the struggle, appear to me to be not only 
unjust but even preposterous. The Legislature had 
other great subjects to deal with, besides the Irish 
Church. Four years of deadly conflict on such a 

* ' Corrected Speech on the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill,' 1851, \\ 28. 



A OHAPTEE OF AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 39 

matter might well be followed by five times four of 
repose. But in tlie mean time individuals, by their 
partial and occasional efforts, bore witness to a prin- 
ciple broader than any which they formally an- 
nounced. That principle — the application of a true 
religious equality to Ireland — was biding its time. 

No one, in my opinion, was bound to assert, by 
speech or vote, any decisive opinion upon so great 
and formidable a question until he should think, 
upon a careful survey of the ground and the time, of 
the assisting and opposing forces, that the season for 
action had come. The motions actually made were 
commonly motions for inquiry, or motions aimed 
generally at a change. I did not enter into the de- 
bates. When I voted, I voted against them ; and 
against such motions, if they were made, I should 
vote again. 

I now arrive at the Grovernment of 1859-65. He 
who has slejDt long is lil^ely soon to wake. After the 
Free Trade struggles of 1860 and 1861 were over, 
so it was, I thought, with the question of the Irish 
Church. There was a lull in political affairs. They 
hung, in a great degree, upon a single life — the re- 
markable life of Lord Palmerston. It was surely right 
to think a little of the future. The calm was certain 
to be succeeded by a breeze, if not a gale. It was 
too plain to me that the inner disposition of Ireland, 
relatively to this country, was not improving ; and 
that, in the course of years, more or fewer, the ques- 
tion of the Irish Church was certain to revive, and, if 
it should revive, probably to be carried to a final 
issue. My first thought, under these circumstances, 



40 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

was about my constitueDts. Anxiously occupied in 
other matters, I did not give my nights and days to 
the question of the Irish Church. Yet the question 
continually flitted, as it were, before me ; and I felt 
that, before that question arose in a practical shape, 
my relation to the University should be considered, 
and its Convocation distinctly apprised that at the 
proper time it would be my duty to support very 
extensive changes in. the Irish Church. My valued 
friend. Sir R. Palmer, has done me the favour, of his 
own motion, to state in public that I then apprised 
him of my state of mind : — 

" There had been people who had said, * You would never 
have heard anything about the Irish Church question from 
Mr. Gladstone if the Tories had not been in power, and he 
had not wanted to get their place.' (Hear, hear.) To his 
certain knowledge that was not true. He could mention 
what had taken place between Mr. Gladstone and himself, 
and he did so the rather because it did justice to him, and 
would show them that his own mind had been particularly 
addressed to that subject, to which he had paid some degree 
of attention some years before the present time. In the year 
1863, at a time when no one was bringing forward this 
question, or seemed very likely to do so, Mr. Gladstone had 
told him privately that he had made up his mind on the 
subject, and that he should not be able to keep himself from 
giving public expression to his feelings. How far or near 
that might be practicable, he could not foresee ; but, under 
the circumstances, he wanted his friends connected with the 
University of Oxford to consider whether or not they would 
desire for that reason a change in the representation of the 
University." * 

* Sir R. Palmer's speech at Richmond, August, 1868. From the ' Man- 
chester Examiner ' of August 24. 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 41 

Partly because I felt that this question might 
come to the front, and partly because I saw a mani- 
fest determination in a portion of the Academical 
constituency to press my friends with incessant con- 
tests, of which I was unwilling to be the hero, I 
was not indisposed to retire without compulsion 
from the seat, if it could have been done without 
obvious detriment to the principles on which I 
had been returned. This was judged to be un- 
certain. Consequently, I remained. But in 1865, 
on the motion of Mr. Dillwyn, I made a speech, 
in which I declared that present action was impos- 
sible, that at any period immense difficulties would 
have to be encountered, but that this was "the ques- 
tion of the future." I stated strongly, though sum- 
marily, some of the arguments against the Church 
as it stood. I entirely abstained from advising or 
glancing at the subject of mere reform, and I did not 
use one word from which it could be inferred that I 
desired it to continue in its j)lace as the National or 
Established Church of the country. 

My speech was immediately denounced by Mr. 
(now Chief Justice) Whiteside, as one intended to 
be fatal to the Established Cliurch of Ireland when 
an opportunity should arise ;* and I am told that my 
opponents in the University circulated my speech 
among their portion of the constituency (as I think 
they were quite justified in doing) to my prejudice. 
My friends, however, stood by me, and resolved to 

* ' Hansard,' vol. clxxviii. p. 444. — " But 1 do complain of a Minister 
wlio, himself the author of a book in defence of Church and State, when 
one branch of the Christian Church is attacked and in danger, delivers a 
speech, every word of which is hostile to its existence when the right time 
comes for attacking it." 



42 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

contend for the seat. An application was made to 
me by a distinguished scholar, divine, and teacher, 
the Warden of Trinity College, Glenalmond, to give 
certain explanations for the appeasing of doubts. I 
did so in the following letter : — 

" 11, Carlton House Terrace, S.W., June 8, 1865. 

" Deak De. Hannah, 

"It would be very difficult for me to subscribe to 
any interpretation of my speech on the Irish Church like 
that of your correspondent, which contains so many con- 
ditions aad bases of a plan for dealing with a question 
apparently remote, aad at the same time full of difficulties 
on every side. My reasons are, I think, plain. First, 
because the question is remote, and apparently out of all 
bearing on the practical politics of the day, I think it would 
be for me worse than superfluous to determine upon any 
scheme or basis of a scheme with respect to it. Secondly, 
because it is difficult, even if I anticipated any likelihood of 
being called upon to deal with it, I should think it right to 
make no decision beforehand on the mode of dealins; with the 
difficulties. But the first reason is that which chiefly weighs. 
As far as I know, my speech signifies pretty clearly the broad 
distinction which I take between the abstract and the prac- 
tical views of the subject. And I think I have stated strongly 
my sense of the responsibility attaching to the opening of 
such a question, except in a state of things which gave 
promise of satisfactorily closing it. For this reason it is that 
I have been so silent about the matter, and may probably be 
so again ; but I could not as a Minister, and as member for 
Oxford, allow it to be debated an indefinite number of times 
and remain silent. One thing, however, I may add, because 
I think it a clear landmark. In any measure dealing with 
the Irish Church, I think (though I scarcely expect ever to 
be called on to share in such a measure) the Act of Union 
must be recognised and must have important consequences, 
especially with reference to the position of the hierarchy. 
" I am much obliged to you for writing, and I hope you 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 43 

will see and approve my reasons for not wishing to carry 
my otvn mind further into a question lying at a distance I 
cannot measure. 

** Yours sincerely, 

(Signed) " W. E. Gladstone. 

**Rev. the Waeden, Trin. Coll., Perth." 

The letter has been the object of much criticism 
upon these three grounds. First, it contained a 
statement that the Act of Union ought to entail im- 
portant consequences in the formation of any measure 
relating to the Irish Church. Secondly, that the 
question was hardly within the domain of practical 
politics. Thirdly, that I felt very uncertain whether 
it would be dealt with in my time. The explanation 
of the first is as follows : — In contemplating the sub- 
ject of the Irish Church, I did not see how to give 
full effect to the principle of religious equality with- 
out touching the composition of the House of Lords. 
In this strait, my personal opinion was that it 
would be best to retain (though in an altered form) 
the Episcopal element from Ireland in the House of 
Lords^ lest its withdrawal should lead to other 
changes, of a kind to weaken the constitution of that 
important branch of the legislature ; and thus far I 
was disposed to abridge the application of religious 
equality to Ireland. I had not yet examined the 
question so closely as to perceive that this mode of 
proceeding was wholly impracticable, and that the 
inconvenience of removing the Irish Bishops must be 
faced. And for my part I have not been so bappy, 
at any time of my life, as to be able sufficiently to 
adjust the proper conditions of handling any difficult 



44. A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

question, until the question itself was at the door. 
This retention of the Bishops in the House of Peers 
was the important consequence that I thought the 
Act of Union would draw. 

Among those errors of the day which may be 
called singular as vulgar errors, is that which sup- 
poses the fifth Article of the Act of Union with Ire- 
land to refer to the endowments of the Church. Its 
terms touch exclusively her '' doctrine, worship, 
discipline, and government." There is no violation of 
this section of the Act of Union in withdrawing her 
endowments, were she stripped of every shilling. But 
it may be said that her '' government," as distinguished 
from her discipline, perhaps involves the position of ^ 
her exclusive relation to the State. So I thought; ^ 
and accordingly thus I wrote to Dr. Hannah. 

The second proposition of the letter was not only 
in harmony with my speech, it was simply the con- 
densation of the speech into a brief form of words. 
For, agreeing with Mr. Dillwyn as to the merits of 
the case, I held, as I have ever held, that it is not 
the duty of a Minister to be forward in inscribing on 
the Journals of Parliament his own abstract views; 
or to disturb the existence of a great institution like 
the Church of Ireland, until he conceives the time to 
be come when he can probably give effect to his 
opinions. Because the question was not within the 
range of practical politics, agreeing with his sen- 
timent, I voted against his motion. 

But, forsooth, it is a matter of wonder that I should 
have felt doubtful whether the Irish Church would 
be dealt with in my time. Now, I do not complain 
of this. It is an example of what is continually hap- 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOaRAPHY. 45 

pening in human affairs, of the mythical handling of 
facts, of the reflection of the ideas, feelings, and circum- 
stances of one period upon the events of another, and 
thus dressing the past in the garb of the present. I 
abide by this, and by every word of the letter. The 
question of the Irish Church was in my view, in the 
year 1865, what, be it remembered, the question of 
Parliamentary Reform seemed to be in the first moiety 
of the year 1830 — namely, a remote question. Had 
any man said to me, " How soon will it come on ?" 
I should have replied, '^ Heaven knows ; perhaps it 
will be five years, perhaps it will be ten." My duty 
was to let my constituents know the state of my 
mind on a matter so important, because the wind was 
gradually veering to that quarter, even though I 
might not believe, and did not believe it to be the 
most probable event, that it would reach the point 
for action during the life of the Parliament just then 
about to be elected. But then I referred to my own 
political lifetime. On that subject I will only say 
that a man who, in 1865, completed his thirty-third 
year of a laborious career who had already followed 
to the grave the remains of almost all the friends 
abreast of whom he had started from the University 
in the career of public life ; and who had observed 
that, excepting two recent cases, it was hard to find 
in our whole history a single man who had been 
permitted to reach the fortieth year of a course of 
labour similar to his own within the walls of the 
House of Commons ; sueh a man might surely be 
excused if he did not venture to reckon for himself 
on an exemption from the lot of greater and better 
men, and if he formed a less sanguine estimate of the 



46 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

fraction of space yet remaining to him, than seems to 
have been the case with his critics. 

The reasons that, in my judgment, prove the time 
now to have arrived for deahng decisively with the 
question of the Irish Church Establishment, must be 
treated elsewhere than in these pages. 

So far as Ireland, and the immediate controversy, 
and my personal vindication are concerned, I have 
done. But there is matter of wider interest, which 
connects itself with the subject. The change of con- 
duct, the shifting of the mind of an individual, 
shrink into insignificance by the side of the question, 
What has been, since 1838, the- direction of the public 
sentiment, the course of law and administration, the 
general march of affairs ? 

I have described the erroneous impressions as to 
the actual and prospective state of things, under 
which was urged the practical application of that 
system of thought embodied in my work of 1838. 
It may be said my error was a gross or even an 
absurd one. On that question I need not enter. But 
I will endeavour to bring into view some circum- 
stances relating to the time, which may help to 
account for it. And here I feel that I pass beyond 
the narrower and more personal scope of these pages, 
if I attempt to recall some of the changes that have 
taken place during the last thirty or fiv e-and-thirty 
years, in matters which bear upon the religious 
character and relations of the State. 

At that time, Jews, and others not adopting the 
Christian name, were excluded from civil office ; and 
though Roman Catholics and Nonconformists had 
effected an entrance into Parliament, there still re- 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 47 

mained an oath for the former, and a declaration for 
the latter, which, if they did not practically limit 
freedom, yet denoted, like the mark of chains on the 
limbs of an emancipated slave, that there had been a 
time when it did not exist. The Establishment of 
Scotland was still entire, and animated with the 
strength principally of the eminent men who after- 
wards led the Free Church Secession. The attack on 
the Irish Church, pushed in 1835 with earnestness 
and vigour by the Liberal party, had speedily proved 
to be hopeless. The State continued to make to other 
persuasions certain grants, little more than compas- 
sionate, and handed down from other times ; but, even 
in the case of the classes especially in its charge, such 
as soldiers and sailors, or such again as paupers and 
criminals, it rarely permitted, and still more rarely 
provided for them, the means of religious worship 
according to their own religious convictions. In the 
great province of popular education in England, 
nothing was granted except to schools of the Church, 
or to schools in which, while the Bible was read, no 
religion other than that of the Church was taught ; 
and he would have been deemed something more 
than a daring prophet, who should have foretold that 
in a few years the utmost ambition of the lay cham- 
pions, and of the spiritual heads of the Church, 
would be to obtain the maintenance of a denomina- 
tional system in popular education, under which all 
religions alike should receive the indirect, yet not 
unsubstantial, countenance of the State. 

But the most important of all the changes which 
have taken place within the interval, has been the 



48 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

change in the condition of the Church of England 
itself. 

Even for those old enough to have an adequate 
recollection of the facts, it requires no inconsiderable 
mental effort to travel backwards over the distrac- 
tions, controversies, perils, and calamities of the last 
thirty years, to the period immediately before those 
years ; and to realise not only the state of facts, but 
especially the promises and prospects which it pre- 
sented. I am well aware that any description of it 
which may now be attempted will appear to bear 
more or less the colour of romance ; but, without 
taking it into view, no one can either measure the 
ground over which we have travelled, or perceive 
how strong was then the temptation to form an over- 
sanguine estimate of the probable progress of the 
Church in her warfare with sin and ignorance, and 
even in persuading seceders of all kinds to re-enter 
her fold. 

That time was a time such as comes, after sickness, 
to a man in the flower of life, with an unimpaired 
and buoyant constitution ; the time in which, though 
health is as yet incomplete, the sense and the joy of 
health are keener, as the fresh and living current first 
flows in, than are conveyed by its even and undis- 
turbed possession. 

The Church of England had been passing through 
a long period of deep and chronic religious lethargy. 
For many years, perhaps for some generations, 
Christendom might have been challenged to show, 
either then or from any former age, a clergy (with 
exceptions) so secular and lax, or congregations 
so cold, irreverent, and indevout. The process of 



A CHAPTEE OF AUTOBIOGKAPHY. 49 

awakening had, indeed, begun many years before ; 
but a very long time is required to stir up effectually 
a torpid body, whose dimensions overspread a great 
country. Active piety and zeal among the clergy, 
and yet more among the laity, had been in a great 
degree confined within the narrow limits of a party, 
which, however meritorious in its work, presented 
in the main phenomena of transition, and laid but 
little hold on the higher intellect and cultivation of 
the country. Our churches and our worship bore in 
general too conclusive testimony to a frozen in- 
difference. No effort had been made either to over- 
take the religious destitution of the multitudes at 
home, or to follow the numerous children of the 
Church, migrating into distant lands, with any due 
provision for their spiritual wants. The richer bene- 
fices were very commonly regarded as a suitable 
provision for such members of the higher families 
as were least fit to push their way in any profes- 
sion requiring thought or labour. The abuses of 
plurality and non-residence v/ere at a height, which, 
if not proved by statistical returns, it would now be 
scarcely possible to believe. In the greatest public 
school of the country (and I presume it may be taken 
as a sample of the rest) the actual teaching of Chris- 
tianity was all but dead, though happily none of its 
forms had been surrendered. It is a retrospect full 
of gloom ; and with all our Romanising, and all our 
Rationalising, what man of sense would wish to go 
back upon those dreary times : 

" Domos Ditis vaciias, et inania regna " ? * 

* Mn. vi. 



50 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

But between 1831 and 1840, the transformation, 
which had previously begun, made a progress alto- 
gether marvellous. Much was due, without doubt, 
to the earnest labour of individuals. Such men as 
Bishop Blomfield on the Bench, and Dr. Hook in 
the parish (and I name them only as illustrious 
examples), who had long been toiling with a patient 
but a dauntless energy, began as it were to get the 
upper hand. But causes of deep and general opera- 
tion were also widely at work. As the French 
Eevolution had done much to renovate Christian 
belief on the Continent, so the Church of England 
was less violently, but pretty sharply, roused by the 
political events which arrived in a rattling succes- 
sion. In 1828, the repeal of the Test Act. In 1829, 
the emancipation of the Roman Catholics. In 1831-2, 
the agony and triumph of Reform. In 1833, the 
Church Temporalities Act for Ireland. There was 
now a general uprising of religious energy in the 
Church throughout the land. It saved the Church. 
Her condition before 1830 could not possibly have 
borne the scrutinising eye, which for thirty years 
past has been turned upon our institutions. Her 
rank corruptions must have called down the avenging 
arm. But it was arrested just in time. 

It would be difficult to give a just and full idea 
of the beneficial changes which were either accom- 
plished or begun during this notable decade of years. 
They embraced alike formal, official movements, of a 
nature to strike the general eye, and those local im- 
provements in detail, which singly are known only 
in each neighbourhood, but which unitedly transform 
the face of a country. Laws were passed to repress 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 51 

gross abuses, and the altering spirit of the clergy 
seconded and even outstripped the laws. The out- 
ward face of divine worship began to be renovated, 
and the shameful condition of the sacred fabrics was. 
rapidly amended, with such a tide of public approval 
as overflowed all the barriers of party and of sect, 
and speedily found its manifestations even in the 
seceding communions. There is no reason to doubt 
that at that time at least, and before such changes 
had become too decidedly the fashion, the outward 
embellishment of churches, and the greater decency 
and order of services, answered to, and sprang from, 
a call within, and proved a less unworthy conception 
of the sublime idea of Christian worship. The mis- 
sionary arm of the Church began to exhibit a vigour 
wholly unknown to former years. Noble efforts 
were made, under the auspices of the chief bishops 
of the Church, to provide for the unsatisfied spiritual 
wants of the metropolis. The great scheme of the 
Colonial Episcopate was founded ; and, in its outset, led 
to such a development of apostolic zeal and self-denial 
as could not but assist, by a powerful reaction, the 
domestic progress. The tone of public schools (on one 
of which Arnold was now spending his noble energies) 
and of universities, was steadily yet rapidly raised. 
The greatest change of all was within the body of 
the clergy.* A devoted piety and an unworldly life, 
which had been the rare exceptions, became visibly 
from year to year more and more the rule. The 

* It was, I think, about the year 1835, that I first met the Rev. Sydney 
Smith, at the house of Mr. Hallam. In conversation after dinner he said to 
me, with the double charm of humour and of good-humour, " The improve- 
ment of the clergy in my time has been astonishing. Whenever you meet 
a clergyman of my age, yoa may be quite sure that he is a bad clergyman." 

E 2 



52 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

spectacle, as a whole, was like what we are told of a 
Russian spring : when, after long months of rigid 
cold, almost in a day the snow dissolves, the ice 
breaks up and is borne away^ and the whole earth is 
covered with a rush of verdure. These were bright 
and happy days for the Church of England. She 
seemed^ or seemed to seem, as a Church recalling the 
descriptions of Holy Writ ; to be '^ beautiful as the 
sun which goeth forth in his might," * '' and terrible 
as an army with banners." f 

Of this great renovating movement, a large part 
centred in Oxford. At the time, indeed, when I 
resided there, from 1828 to 1831, no sign of it had 
yet appeared. A steady, clear, but dry Anglican 
orthodoxy bore sway, and frowned, this way or that, 
on the first indication of any tendency to diverge 
from the beaten path. Dr. Pusey was, at that time, 
revered, indeed, for his piety and charity, no less than 
admired for his learning and talents, but suspected 
(I believe) of sympathy with the German theology, 
in which he was known to be profoundly versed. 
Dr. Newman was thought to have about him the 
flavour of what, he has now told the world, were 
the opinions he had derived in youth from the works 
of Thomas Scott. Mr. Keble, the "sweet singer of 
Israel," and a true saint, if this generation has seen 
one, did not reside in Oxford. | The chief Chair of 
Theology had been occupied by Bishop Lloyd, the 
old tutor and the attached and intimate friend of 



* Judges, V. 31. t Canticles, vi. 4. 

X Since these lines were written I have learned, upon authority which 
cannot he questioned, that Mr. Keble acknowledged the justice of disestab- 
lishing the Irish Church. 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 53 

Peel : a man of powerful talents, and of a character 
both winning and decided, who, had his life been 
spared, might have acted powerfully for good on the 
fortunes of the Church of England, by guiding the 
energetic influences which his teaching had done 
much to form. But he had been hurried away in 1829 
by an early death : and Dr. Whately, who was also, 
in his own way, a known power in the University, 
was in 1830 induced to accept the Archbishopric 
of Dublin. There was nothing at that time in the 
theology, or in the religious life, of the University 
to indicate what was to come. But when, shortly 
afterwards, the great heart of England began to beat 
with the quickened pulsations of a more energetic 
religious life, it was in Oxford that the stroke was 
most distinct and loud. An extraordinary change 
appeared to pass upon the spirit of the place. I 
believe it would be a moderate estimate to say that 
much beyond one half of the very flower of its youth 
chose the profession of Holy Orders, while an im- 
pression scarcely less deep seemed to be stamped 
upon a large portion of its lay pupils. I doubt 
whether at any period of its existence, either since 
the Reformation, or perhaps before it, the Church of 
England had reaped from either University, in so 
short a time, so rich a harvest. At Cambridge a 
similar lifting up of heart and mind seems to have 
been going on ; and numbers of persons of my own 
generation, who at their public schools had been 
careless and thoughtless like the rest, appeared in 
their early manhood as soldiers of Christ, and minis- 
ters to the wants of His people, worthy, I believe, 
as far as man can be worthy, through their zeal, 
devotion, powers of mind, and attainments, of their 



54 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

high vocation. It was not then foreseen what storms 
Avere about to rise. Not only in Oxford, but in 
England, during the years to which I refer, party 
spirit within the Church was reduced to a low ebb. 
Indiscretions there might be, but authority did not 
take alarm : it smiled rather, on the contrary, on what 
was thought to be in the main a recurrence both to 
first principles and to forgotten obligations. Purity, 
unity, and energy seemed, as three fair sisters hand in 
hand, to advance together. Such a state of things 
was eminently suited to act on impressible and 
sanguine minds. I, for one, formed a completely 
false estimate of what was about to happen ; and 
believed that the Church of England, through the 
medium of a regenerated clergy and an intelligent 
and attached laity, would not only hold her ground, 
but would even in great part probably revive the 
love and the allegiance both of the masses who were 
wholly falling away from religious observances, and 
of those large and powerful nonconforming bodies, 
the existence of which was supposed to have no 
other cause than the neglect of its duties by the 
National Church, which had long left the people as 
sheep without a shepherd. 

And surely it would have required either a deeply 
saturnine or a marvellously projohetic mind to foretell 
that, in ten or twelve more years, that powerful and 
distinguished generation of clergy would be broken 
up : that at least a moiety of the most gifted sons, 
whom Oxford had reared for the service of the 
Church of England, would be hurling at her head 
the hottest bolts of the Vatican : that, with their 
deviation on the one side, there would arise a not less 
convulsive rationalistic movement on the other ; and 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 55 

that the natural consequences would be developed in 
endless contention and estrangement, and in sus- 
picions worse than either, because even less accessible, 
and even more intractable. Since that time, the 
Church of England may be said to have bled at 
every pore ; and at this hour it seems occasionally 
to quiver to its very base. And yet, all the while, 
the religious life throbs more and more powerfully 
within her. Shorn of what may be called the 
romance and poetry of her revival, she abates nothing 
of her toil ; and in the midst of every sort of partial 
indiscretion and extravagance, her great office in the 
care of souls is, from year to year, less and less 
imperfectly discharged. But the idea of asserting 
on her part those exclusive claims^ which become 
positively unjust in a divided country governed on 
popular principles, has been abandoned by all parties 
in the State. 

There was an error not less serious in my estimate 
of English Nonconformity. I remember the astonish- 
ment with which at some period, — I think in 1851-2, 
— -after ascertaining the vast addition which had 
been made to the number of churches in the country, 
I discovered that the multiplication of chapels, among 
those not belonging to the Church of England, had 
been more rapid still. But besides the immense 
extension of its material and pastoral organisation, 
English Nonconformity (in general) appears now to 
have founded itself on a principle of its own, which 
forbids the alliance of the civil power with religion 
in any particular form or forms. I do not embrace 
that principle. But I must observe, in passing, that 
it is not less unjust than it is common to stigmatise 
those who hold it as " political Dissenters," — a phrase 



56 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

implying that they do not dissent on religious grounds. 
But if they, because they object to the union of 
Church and State, are political Dissenters, it follows 
that all who uphold it are political Churchmen. 

The entire miscalculation which I have now endea- 
voured to describe of the religious state and prospects 
of the country, was combined with a view of the 
relative position of governors and governed, since 
greatly modified ; and the two lay at the root of 
my error. These two causes led me into the ex- 
cess of recommending the continued maintenance of 
a theory which was impracticable, and which, if it 
could have been enforced, would have been, under the 
circumstances of the country, less than just. For I 
never held that a National Church should be per- 
manently maintained except for the nation, — I mean 
either for the whole of it or, at least, for the greater 
part, with some kind of real concurrence or general 
acquiescence from the remainder. 

Against the proposals of my book, Lord Macaulay 
had set up a theory of his own.* 

"That we may give Mr. Gladstone his revenge, we will 
state concisely our own views respecting the alliance of 
Church and State 

" We consider the primary end of Government as a purely 
temporal end, the protection of the persons and property 
of men. 

" We think that Government, like every other contrivance 
of human wisdom, from the highest to the lowest, is likely to 
answer its main end best, when it is constructed with a single 
view to that end 

" Government is not an institution for the propagation of 
religion, any more than St. George's Hospital is an institution 
for the propagation of religion. And the most absurd and 

* ' Ed. Rev.', April, ISo'J, p. 273-6. 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 57 

pernicious consequences would follow if Government should 
pursue as its primary end, tliat which can never be more 
than its secondary end : though intrinsically more important 
than its primary end. But a Government w^hich considers 
the religious instruction of the people as a secondary end, 
and follows out that principle faithfully, wall we think be 
likely to do much good and little harm." 

These sentences, I think, give a fair view of Lord 
Macaulay's philosophy of Church Establishments. It 
has all the clearness and precision that might be 
expected from him. But I own myself unable to 
accept it as it stands. I presume to think that per- 
haps Lord Macaulay, like myself, made, from a limited 
induction, a hasty generalisation. The difference 
was, that his theory was right for the practical pur- 
pose of the time, while mine was wrong. Considered, 
however, in the abstract, that theory appears to me 
to claim kindred with the ethical code of another 
writer, not less upright, and not less limpid, so to 
speak, than Lord Macaulay himself, I mean Dr. Paley. 
And the upshot of it may be comprised in three words : 
Government is police. All other functions, except 
those of police proper, are the accidents of its exist- 
ence. As if a man should say to his friend when in 
the country, '' I am going up to town ; can I take 
anything for you ? " So the State, while busy about 
protecting life and property, will allow its officer of 
police to perform any useful office for the community, 
to instruct a wayfarer as to his road, or tell the passer 
by what o'clock it is, provided it does not interfere 
with his watching the pickpocket, or laying the 
strong hand upon the assassin. I doubt if it is pos- 
sible to cut out, as it were, with a pair of scissors, 



58 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

patterns of policy, which shall solve for all time and 
place the great historic problem of the relation of the 
civil power to religion. 

It seems to me that in every function of life, and 
in every combination with his fellow-creatures, for 
whatever purpose, the duties of man are limited 
only by his powers. It is easy to separate, in the 
case of a Gas Company or a Chess Club, the primary 
end for which it exists, from everything extraneous 
to that end. It is not so easy in the case of the State 
or of the family. If the primary end of the State 
is to protect life and property, so the primary end 
of the family is to propagate the race. But around 
these ends there cluster, in both cases, a group of 
moral purposes, variable indeed with varying circum- 
stances, but yet inhering in the relation, and not 
external or merely incidental to it. The action of 
man in the State is moral, as truly as it is in the 
individual sphere ; although it be limited by the fact 
that, as he is combined with others whose views and 
wills may differ from his own, the sphere of the 
common operations must be limited, first, to the 
things in which all are agreed ; secondly, to the things 
in which, though they may not be agreed, yet equity 
points out, and the public sense acknowledges, that 
the whole should be bound by the sense of the 
majority. 

I can hardly believe that even those, including as 
they do so many men both upright and able, w^ho 
now contend on principle for the separation of the 
Church from the State, are so determined to exalt 
their theorem to the place of an universal truth, that 
they ask us to condemn the whole of that process, by 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 59 

which, as the Grospel spread itself through the civi- 
hsed world, Christianity became incorporated with the 
action of civil authority, and with the framework of 
public law. In the course of human history, indeed, 
w^e perceive little of unmixed evil, and far less of 
universal good. It is not difficult to discern that (in 
the language of Bishop Heber) as the world became 
Christian, Christianity became worldly ; that the 
average tone of a system, which embraces in its 
wide-spreading arms the entire coramunity, is almost 
of necessity lower than that of a society which, if 
large, is still private, and into which no man enters 
except by his own deliberate choice, very possibly even 
at the cost of much personal and temporal detriment. 
But Christ died for the race : and those who notice 
the limited progress of conversion in the w^orld until 
alliance with the civil authority gave to His religion 
a wider access to the attention of mankind^ may be 
inclined to doubt whether, without that alliance, its 
immeasurable and inestimable social results would 
ever have been attained. Allowing for all that may 
be justly urged against the danger of mixing secular 
motives with religious administration, and above all 
against the intrusion of force into the domain of 
thought ; I for one cannot desire that Constantine in 
the government of the empire, that Justinian in the 
formation of its code of laws, or that Charlemagne in 
refounding society, or that Elizabeth in the crisis of 
the English Eeformation, should have acted on the 
principle that the State and the Church in themselves 
are separate or alien powers, incapable of coalition. 

But there are two causes, the combined operation 
of which, upon reaching a certain point of develop- 



60 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

ment, relaxes or dissolves their union by a process 
as normal (if it be less beneficial) as that by which 
the union was originally brought about. One of 
these is the establishment of the principle of popular 
self-government as the basis of political constitutions. 
The other is the disintegration of Christendom from 
one into many communions. As long as the Church 
at large, or the Church within the limits of the nation, 
is substantially one, I do not see why the religious 
care of the subject, through a body properly consti- 
tuted for the purpose, should cease to be a function 
of the State, with the whole action and life of which 
it has, throughout Europe, been so long and so closely 
associated. As long as the State holds, by descent, 
by the intellectual superiority of the governing 
classes, and by the good will of the people, a position 
of original and imderived authority, there is no abso- 
lute impropriety, but the reverse, in its commending 
to the nation the greatest of all boons. But when, 
either by some Revolution of institutions from their 
summit to their base, or by a silent and surer process, 
analogous to that which incessantly removes and 
replaces the constituent parts of the human body, 
the State has come to be the organ of the deliberate 
and ascertained will of the community, expressed 
through legal channels — then the inculcation of a 
religion can no longer rest, in full or permanent 
force, upon its authority. When, in addition to this, 
the community itself is split and severed into opinions 
and communions, which, whatever their concurrence 
in the basis of Christian belief, are hostile in regard 
to the point at issue, so that what was meant for the 
nation dwindles into the private estate as it were of 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 61 

a comparative handful — the attempt to maintain an 
Estabhshed Church becomes an error fatal to the 
peace, dangerous perhaps even to the life, of civil 
society. Such a Church then becomes (to use a 
figure I think of John Foster's), no longer the temple, 
but the mere cemetery, of a great idea. Such a 
policy is then not simply an attempt to treat what is 
superannuated and imbecile as if it were full of life 
and vigour, but to thwart the regular and normal 
action of the ruling social forces, to force them from 
their proper channels, and to turn them by artificial 
contrivance, as Apollo turned the rivers of Troas 
from their beds, to a purpose of our own. This is to 
set caprice against nature ; and the end must be that, 
with more or less of delay, more or less of struggle 
or convulsion, nature will get the better of caprice. 

But does it follow from all this, that the tone of 
moral action in the State should be lowered ? Such 
a fear is what perplexes serious and sober men, who 
are laudably unwilling to surrender, in a world where 
falsehood has so wide a range, any portion of this 
vantage-ground of truth and right. I, who may 
have helped to mislead them by an over-hasty gene- 
ralisation, would now submit what seems to me calcu- 
lated to re-assure the mind. I make an appeal to the 
history of the last thirty years. During those years, 
what may be called the dogmatic allegiance of the 
State to religion has been greatly relaxed ; but its 
consciousness of moral duty has been not less notably 
quickened and enhanced. I do not say this in de- 
preciation of Christian dogma. But we are still a 
Christian people. Christianity has wrought itself 
into the public life of fifteen hundred years. Precious 



62 A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 

truths, and laws of relative right and the brotherhood 
of man, such as the wisdom of heathenism scarcely 
dreamed of and could never firmly grasp^ the Gospel has 
made to be part of our common inheritance, common as 
the sunlight that warms us, and as the air we breathe. 
Sharp though our divisions in belief may be, they 
have not cut so deep as to prevent, or as perceptibly 
to impair, the recognition of these great guides and 
fences of moral action. It is far better for us to trust 
to the operation of these our common principles and 
feelings, and to serve our Maker together in that 
wherein we are at one, rather than in aiming at a 
standard theoretically higher, to set out with a breach 
of the great commandment, which forms the ground- 
work of all relative duties, and to refuse to do as we 
would be done by. 

It is, then, by a practical rather than a theoretic 
test that our Establishments of religion should be 
tried. In applying this practical test, we must be 
careful to do it with those allowances, which are as 
necessary for the reasoner in moral subjects, as it is 
for the reasoner in mechanics to allow for friction or 
for the resistance of the air. An Establishment that 
does its work in much, and has the hope and likeli- 
hood of doing it in more : an Establishment that has 
a broad and living way open to it, into the hearts of 
the people : an Establishment that can commend the 
services of the present by the recollections and tra- 
ditions of a far-reaching past : an Establishment able 
to appeal to the active zeal of the greater portion of 
the people, and to the respect or scruples of almost 
the whole, whose children dwell chiefly on her actual 
living work and service, and whose adversaries, if she 



A CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 63 

has them, are in the main content to beheve that 
there will be a future for them and their opinions ; 
such an Establishment should surely be maintained. 
But an Establishment that neither does, nor has her 
hope of doing, work, except for a few, and those few 
the portion of the community whose claim to public 
aid is the smallest of all : an Establishment severed 
from the mass of the people by an impassable gulph, 
and by a wall of brass : an Establishment whose good 
offices, could she offer them, would be intercepted by 
a long unbroken chain of painful and shameful recol- 
lections : an Establishment leaning for support upon 
the extraneous aid of a State, which becomes dis- 
credited with the people by the very act of lending 
it : such an Establishment will do well for its own 
sake, and for the sake of its creed, to divest itself, as 
soon as may be, of gauds and trappings, and to com- 
mence a new career, in which, renouncing at once the 
credit and the discredit of the civil sanction, it shall 
seek its strength from within, and put a fearless 
trust in the message that it bears. 



September 22, 1868. 



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CHAPTER OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



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